Big U.S. telephone companies did not deny Thursday that they had turned over the call records of tens of millions of people to the National Security Agency as part of a domestic surveillance program far broader than previously known, allowing the creation of an enormous database. A report of the extensive data collection in USA Today drew bipartisan outrage among lawmakers, but brought a quick rebuff from President George W. Bush, who insisted that 'the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected.' The president denied, in an unscheduled appearance, that the government was 'mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans' and insisted that his administration was simply doing its best to protect the country from terrorist attack. (International Herald Tribune, Friday)
[C]onfidence is everywhere the parent of despotism — free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.
–Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, 1798.
FEE Timely Classic
Ignoring Real Privacy Problems by James Plummer